Why we need a supercomputer on the Moon

October 3, 2012

(Credit: Ouliang Chang)

Building a supercomputer on the moon would be a mammoth technical undertaking, but a University of Southern California graduate student thinks there’s a very good reason for doing it: help alleviate a coming deep-space network traffic jam that’s had NASA scientists worried for several years now.

The plan is to bury a massive machine in a deep dark crater, on the side of the moon that’s facing away from Earth and all of its electromagnetic chatter. Nuclear-powered, it would process data for space missions and slingshot Earth’s Deep Space Network into a brand new moon-centric era.

“Once the physical infrastructure backbone is laid out, I suspect it would look much like the monolith excavation site in Clarke and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,” says Chang’s course supervisor Madhu Thangavelu, of USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering.

The Deep Space Network is a network of 13 giant antennas located in the U.S., Australia, and Spain that gather data and talk to spacecraft in, well, deep space. These space missions are already fighting for bandwidth on this overloaded network and most of the data has to get back to Earth for processing. With a lunar supercomputer, Chang says, that could change.

His supercomputer would run in frigid regions near one of the moon’s poles. The cold temperatures would make cooling the supercomputer easier, and allow it to use super-efficient superconductive materials to move around electricity. Although it’s not clear how much water could be found on the moon’s poles, Chang envisions a water-cooled supercomputer.

How much would this Lunar supercomputer cost? Well, Chang and Thangavelu say it costs about $50,000 per pound to ship materials to the moon. Add to that the cost of digging out and building out the sub-lunar supercomputer center, cooling system and nuclear power generator, and you can easily envision a project in the $10 billion to $20 billion range, never mind the cost of building a lunar base station. That would easily make it the most expensive supercomputer ever built.

The lunar computer would communicate with spaceships and earth using a system of inflatable, steerable antennas that would hang suspended over moon craters, giving the Deep Space Network a second focal point away from earth.

Chang isn’t the first person to propose putting a big data processing facility on the moon. Back in 2004, researchers at Space Systems Loral described something called the Lunar Data Cache — an extraterrestrial backup system that would keep businesses online in the event of a Sept. 11, 2001-type terrorist strike somewhere on Earth. The Loral proposal also described a few way-out moneymaking ideas such as lunar rover-deployed billboards, robotic rock-heaving contests, robot wresting, and rover races piloted by NASCAR drivers.

Related:

comments 22

The show-stopper on this idea is the schedule of large space projects and the inevitable progress in computer performance. Let’s assume this project is as complex an the International Space Station. By the time the 15 to 20 years to deploy it have gone by, there will be more storage and processing in a cell phone and the Singularity will be upon us.

I’m not sure I understand why locating this on the Moon is such a great idea. Essentially everything about building and maintaining a large data center is going to be much easier on the Earth; about the only technical advantage is that by locating it on the far side of the Moon you can avoid nearly all of the Earth-based radio waves so communications with remote probes would be somewhat improved. But you can also achieve pretty good results by using relay antennas in LEO or geosynchronous orbit, without the need to locate the entire data center in such an inaccessible place. Putting it on the Moon also doesn’t solve the need to get a major piece of that data back down to Earth in any event.

For what we’d pay to establish something like this on the Moon, we could probably expand the size of the Deep Space Network by a factor of 10 or more, and have a network that would be much easier to fix when anything went wrong.

The Moon does have some advantages for archival storage, in that it’s pretty much impervious to anything we might do to ourselves (or have done to us by a stray asteroid or the like). It wouldn’t be cheap though.

The main reason they chose the dark side of the moon was to sheild and bury it from stray cosmic radiation. They are also envisioning a large facility like we have in server farms on earth. That’s why I proposed geosynchronous satellites around the moon.. They could be shielded from sun storms and be quite modular in form. This would also facilitate upgrading, as tech advances, instead of being so locked into a underground facility. Older satellites could be retrieved and upgraded much easier.

because NASA has only one purpose and that is to piss away as much money as possible, the steering committee meeting for this idiocy went like this…probably!
‘so Mr Chang you want to build a nuclear powered supercomputer?’
‘yes’
‘hell son why don’t we go the whole way and put the bloody thing on the moon?’
MC ‘ Oooh can we? the dark side would be cool…

Sounds like a good idea. Radiation might be hard to deal with; the entire system would have to either be radiation hardened or have a substantial radiation shield.

Jacques: Technology doesn’t progress on its own. If everyone sat around waiting for computers to get faster, or space technology to get better, nothing would get done. It’s projects like these that advance science and technology. And it isn’t just an experiment for building computers in space, it has current applications too, allowing us to better receive and process information from space.

This idea seems flawed for many reasons, but perhaps the fatal one is the ever-increasing rapidity of technical development. Even before the system were installed and running, it would be obsolete. Just consult the regularly-published list of most powerful supercomputers – it changes rapidly, and what was a mighty machine one year ago is now powering the latest version of the Sims!

Think what Bri means is putting asteroids in orbit around Mars instead of Earth for mining ……I thought it was a good idea, can’t really tell if you are being sarcastic or not ? None the less first thing that needs to happen is the creation of an autonomous mining robot to extract minerals from gathered asteroids .

Honestly my thoughts are more toward near earth activities. The moon has some resources that we can use. We don’t know enough about mars to say what will be available. It’s low gravity makes it a good launch and landing site. It’s also much closer to the asteroids. Some people say we should tow asteroids to near earth orbit. I think it’s a bad idea for a number of reasons. Hitting the earth is one. Mars would be easier, but to tow an asteroid or any significant amount of material from the asteroid belt is a hurculean task. The materials needs to have sufficient value to be worth it. Carbon is probably more important than the metals, also water. I just don’t think people realize how big a challenge it is. Near earth space tourism is probably the best investment. Empty seats means room or I should say reduced weight for payloads, to make the flights cost effective. Most mission should be to the moon and be robotic. The basalt is high in iron and aluminum. Manufacturing everything on the moon will reduce costs. Earth based materials could be tossed up in condensed form on very large rail guns. Higher orbit freighters could collect and ship the materials to near earth processing stages. That and moon materials could give us the right kind of machinery. Ion drives and solar sails could move that out to the asteroid belts.

Keep the super computer in space, in lunar orbit. Put the antennas on the dark side of the moon. Relay everything with smaller satellites in lunar orbit. In terms of space, we need to think of systems closer to earth, then the moon, then asteroids and mars. Mars will be a good platform for asteroid mining. I don’t think anybody is going to be thrilled with towing an asteroid near the earth. I’d hate for it to hit us, because it’s too bulky to maneuver easily.

Yes, and we will need to communicate with the armies of tele-presence robots we use to “mine the sky”. Robots are a lot sturdier than people and better suited for hard labor in outer space…that is, unless we decide to go all medieval and use prison / slave labor instead…